As the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded, many college and university administrators have recognized that they can no longer delay the digital transformation of their institutions. Not only did these administrators have to move instruction online, but they must now also make administrative processes mobile and digital — including faculty recruitment and hiring.

The advantages of using a modern, digital faculty recruitment platform were the focus of a recent webinar Interfolio hosted with guests from two partner institutions, the University of Texas at Austin (UT) and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). 

Long before the pandemic began, these two institutions had fortuitously made the switch to Interfolio Faculty Search, a digital platform that covers the entire academic recruitment process — from creating a job board to facilitating committee review and decision-making. 

During the webinar, the representatives from UT and KAUST highlighted three principal advantages of the platform. Their remarks also made clear that, even when in-person interviews and committee meetings again become possible, these advantages of Faculty Search will persist.

1. Faculty Search’s ease of use promotes adoption and consistency while reducing administrative burdens

Webinar guest Ebtisam Bakhsh, the Faculty Affairs Administrator at KAUST, said that KAUST faculty members quickly embraced Faculty Search because it was so easy to use: 

“Getting faculty to use a new system is not the easiest task. But when we initially rolled out Interfolio as a faculty recruitment tool, I had a faculty member come up to me and ask, ‘Oh, can I use this to post my postdoc positions?’ And that was really great to see that they were so comfortable and wanted to roll it out to wider objectives,” Bakhsh said.

Interfolio’s other webinar guest, Henry Tijerina III, a Digital Project Manager at UT, sees consistency as one of the main advantages of modernizing the hiring process. “Because UT uses Faculty Search for posting positions, we get a consistent title, description, and qualifications, and the position is tagged with the correct department, college, and school. UT is a giant institution, so it’s good to be able to have those required fields to standardize the data.” Of course, standardized data also supports data analysis and reporting.

Institutions are also able to save time, Bakhsh said, because of the platform’s Application Program Interfaces (APIs), which enable connectivity with other programs and sites. Bakhsh elaborated, “We use APIs to push open faculty positions to recruitment tools and websites. What really works well for us is that we only have to update in one place, and the changes are reflected on all sites instantly.”

Tijerina also described how the platform makes administrative work easier and more efficient. With their earlier paper system, he said, correlating all the diversity data was a labor-intensive process. Now, it only takes the push of a button to see Equal Employment Opportunity and diversity data.  

Bakhsh made a similar remark: “In our previous system, it would take us days to pull a report to answer questions like — did we have any applicants from China this year? — but now our super admins can do that easily, just within a few clicks.”

Get an overview of how peers are improving their faculty recruitment in our recent white paper, The Modern Faculty Recruitment Playbook.

2. Faculty Search supports diversity efforts

As the above remarks suggest, Faculty Search has reporting tools that enable quick analysis of diversity data. Faculty diversity, of course, is an important goal at many institutions, but a recent study shows very little progress on this front in higher education. One practice that will help address this gap between faculty diversity aspirations and outcomes is collecting and analyzing faculty recruitment diversity data to assess progress.

Faculty Search helps institutions do just that. For example, Tijerina noted that the platform enables UT to compare its current faculty diversity to the diversity of the search group to assess whether UT is successfully attracting a more diverse pool. With this information, UT then adjusts its national recruitment spending to better support its diversity goals.

At KAUST, departments create forms within Faculty Search that capture diversity data to help the institution measure its progress in increasing diversity.

Efforts like these — and other best practices — are a critical step in improving faculty diversity.

3. Faculty Search enables data-driven decision-making and insights

Of course, collecting and analyzing data helps with more than just diversity efforts. Collecting data also enables administrators to assess their overall faculty hiring process.

For example, the data that Faculty Search collects helps KAUST officials, including Bakhsh, determine whether their marketing efforts are succeeding in attracting the best candidates. 

Similarly, data collection and reporting capabilities within Faculty Search help UT evaluate their faculty recruitment efforts:

“Having everything in one system allows us to gain insights and see trends year over year. For example: How many positions are reposting? Are applications remaining steady or growing, or did they fall? What does our successful candidate look like? Where did they come from? How did they get to the job? These are all things we can pull out of the system really easily,” Tijerina said. This data analysis also helps UT focus their advertising expenditures and make effective marketing investments.

On-Demand Webinar: How Two Institutions Modernized Faculty Recruiting

How did two research universities increase efficiency, diversity, and accountability with streamlined faculty hiring?

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Tijerina added that Faculty Search’s APIs enable data from other programs to be mixed into the analysis, creating a fuller overall picture of their faculty recruitment efforts. For example, UT can look at search data from the Algolia program that UT added to Faculty Search. With this Algolia data combined with the Faculty Search data, UT can see whether candidates are searching for positions that don’t yet exist. This information can suggest potential new opportunities that UT might want to create. 

Bonus advantage: Faculty Search makes a strong impression with prospective faculty

Although the webinar guests focused on the above three advantages of adopting Interfolio’s digital platform for faculty hiring, one additional advantage Tijerina emphasized is worth mentioning:

Faculty Search enables a customizable, branded job board and recruitment experience that puts your institution’s best foot forward to potential recruits. 

As Tijerina explained, UT’s old jobs page wasn’t very welcoming. In response, UT switched to Interfolio because they wanted a new web presence that “highlighted our faculty, our research stories, why should you work at UT, and really elevated the brand of UT.”

If you’re interested in elevating your own institution’s brand and modernizing your faculty recruitment process with a COVID-proof digital platform, you can read more about Faculty Search here and request a demo.

You can also listen to our webinar on How Two Institutions Modernized Faculty Hiring by going to this page.

Institutions of all sizes are interested in streamlining their faculty recruitment processes in order to save time, improve their equity practices, and attract high-quality candidates. A holistic faculty recruitment tool provides a centralized platform that encourages seamless collaboration and transparency across departments and hiring committees.

Factors to consider in faculty hiring

There are plenty of nuances in recruiting and hiring practices of faculty and staff. While certain pieces of information — the CV, cover letter and letters of recommendation — offer helpful insight into candidates’ skills and experiences, these documents aren’t enough on their own. Traditional hiring tools leave out other, multi-dimensional factors that impact the big picture. Some key attributes to consider in the higher education hiring process include:

• Experience
• Expertise
• Accomplishments
• Diversity

Addressing diversity in applicants

One significant shortcoming of traditional hiring software is the difficulty in tracking relevant pieces of information regarding faculty demographics. Traditional faculty recruitment technology gives a snapshot into different candidates’ experience levels, but does not target characteristics that might not typically appear on their CVs.

As an example, many institutions overlook applicant diversity. It’s not that they are intentionally avoiding diverse staff and faculty applicants. In fact, it’s often quite the contrary. Many universities measure recruiting data related to diversity and find that there is a disparity in the percentage of diverse applicants applying for roles and the amount of candidates being called for interviews and receiving offers. They then seek out best practices for recruiting and working with diverse candidates. Some characteristics they might look out for in candidates include, but are not limited to:

• Gender identity
• Race and ethnicity
• Sexual orientation
• Disability
• Age

Interfolio Faculty Search addresses various disparities in faculty hiring to provide equitable opportunities for all prospects and candidates. Our solution provides transparency in applicants’ talents and diversity. In addition, our built-in equal employment opportunity (EEO) forms and reports ensure near 100% compliance regarding diversity data during every step of the recruitment process. This provides an overall more insightful process for hiring professionals and a more equitable experience for diverse candidates seeking faculty and staff positions.

Standardizing candidate criteria

The hiring process requires input from multiple parties, from department heads and administrators to human resources professionals. With so many moving parts and invested parties, it’s essential that institutions empower their staff to collaborate and communicate with consistency. One such way to develop a more holistic approach to faculty recruitment is through the standardization of processes.

A decentralized approach to candidate recruiting and hiring makes it difficult to observe and track hiring data. By switching to a system in which hiring, onboarding, and interviewing materials are readily available to all faculty members, institutions are able to standardize their approaches. In turn, the recruitment process becomes more responsive and produces better results.

Interfolio Faculty Search empowers deans and administrators to standardize criteria, job postings, and messages to candidates to develop and foster an equitable recruiting process across the institution. They can ensure job posting language is consistent, all while tracking when and where jobs are being posted. With one tried-and-true approach to hiring, human resources professionals can make sure they are attracting the best talent. In addition, standardization solidifies the notion that candidates are given equal opportunity at the university.

Streamlining recruitment processes to save time

Staff can save time during recruiting by digitizing formerly manual processes. Most broadly, this refers to the collection, organization, and distribution of applications. Rather than posting each job individually on the institution’s career site,  several openings can be shared at once, all with standardized language. This reduces time spent on tedious, administrative tasks and allows hiring faculty to focus on more strategic tasks. For example, rather than utilizing the time they have allocated for recruitment to writing and uploading job descriptions, they can take a more active role in seeking out qualified candidates.

When you’re ready to streamline your hiring processes and improve equity in recruiting for faculty positions, you may be ready to integrate your system with Interfolio’s Faculty Search solutions. This centralized platform provides hiring managers with more insight throughout the recruitment process. If you’d like to find out more about how Interfolio can provide you with a more equitable experience for faculty members and applicants, check out our selection of resources.

In 2014, Dr. Jeffery Aper became Provost at Millikin University and led the school through a transitional period regarding its partnership with Interfolio’s solution for supporting faculty hiring processes. Transitional, in part, because since 2013, Millikin adopted Interfolio’s Faculty Search platform, then decided to build a homegrown system due to internal budget constraints, and then went back to Interfolio.

Dr. Aper agreed to sit down and tell us about his leadership role and his experiences using the system. Take a look at what Provost Aper had to say!

Tell us about Millikin’s relationship with Interfolio and how it has transitioned from on, off, and on again.

Millikin University first adopted Interfolio’s Faculty Search in 2013 to support management of their faculty and staff hiring processes. In 2015, the end of my first year, Millikin decided to drop Interfolio’s platform due to budgetary reasons. A team at Millikin had been working with our IT staff and developed a homegrown faculty hiring platform used for receiving application materials and storing them on a shared drive to support an internal process. However, the in-house system did not meet our needs. People couldn’t access it. It just didn’t work. It didn’t make us more efficient.  

During the period when we we tried using our in-house system, the comments we received included: “Why did we drop Interfolio?” “Can we go back to Interfolio?” And I had department chairs and deans imploring me to do what I could to get the university into the use of the Interfolio system.

So I pressed the case that as soon as possible we needed to re-up with Interfolio because the product had worked well for us in the past. Thankfully everyone on campus agreed, so we were able to re-adopt Interfolio and use it to run our hiring searches again.  

Were you familiar with Interfolio’s faculty hiring platform before taking the provost’s position at Millikin?

I had been familiar with Interfolio’s Faculty Search, but only at the individual level, having submitted letters of reference for candidates seeking positions at other institutions. It was not until arriving at Millikin that I experienced Interfolio from the institution’s perspective.  

What were your first impressions with Interfolio’s platform from the institution’s perspective?

I was very pleased. This was such a vastly better approach to hiring than the traditional method of keeping all kinds of paper files, trying to maintain the security of those files, and trying to make sure members of the search committee had access to the documents while trying to maintain the confidentiality of those materials. The solution gave us so many better options for managing those processes.

Have you used the system in workflows other than faculty hiring?

Yes, we use Faculty Search for faculty and staff hiring processes, and for faculty honors and awards given by the University. Using the solution for these internal applications has been very valuable.

I ran a search for a new dean two years ago. We used Interfolio extensively for receiving and warehousing materials and allowing committees to access materials in a confidential way. The system was a real value to us because it made it so much easier to keep track of the appropriate records, make sure those records were maintained in a secure way, and give the committee access.

Similarly for staff positions, we use Interfolio for even administrative assistant searches because it helped us be more efficient and effective in maintaining those records and making sure we’ve got all the documents assembled.

We were able to set up an internal application process for faculty awards, honors, and professional development opportunities. For example, we’ve got eight endowed professorships that rotate among faculty members who qualify for the awards. All of those involve the submission of a significant amount of background materials. We used to be handing boxes of paper to committees and the committee was supposed to keep it secure. We were trying to make sure confidential materials did not end up left on tables in conference rooms.  

Using Interfolio has been an immense improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of those review processes—allowing us to set up an online format to submit their materials for all of these competitive processes. Using Interfolio has benefited us significantly. I am definitely a fan.

What about Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) data?

That’s information we will keep track of no matter what system we’re using, so it’s a benefit to have a system to assemble those kinds of data. Any time you’ve got an automated system collect a consistent record of your activities, instead of having an individual in the HR office compile a report, there’s a benefit.  Faculty and staff time is a precious commodity. Anything we can do to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of collecting, managing, and reporting data is beneficial for us.

What problems were you seeking to solve in deciding to select Interfolio’s Faculty Search?

I’ve overseen scores of faculty searches over the years as the commissioning officer. Having done that many, many times, the chronic challenges to make sure you have a very accurate systematic way of receiving materials, compiling and maintaining those materials, and making them available to committees—but also maintaining their confidentiality and securities—are constant headaches with paper systems. The Interfolio application, in many ways, solves the headaches in those processes, and to me that’s just golden.

Are faculty buying in to the system?  

In the last four years, we’ve used Interfolio as a basis for maintaining our records on searches. We’ve done at least 25 to 30 searches involving many committee members and have not received one complaint, and that’s quite a statement in itself.

Faculty members are not reticent about sharing their opinions about what works and what doesn’t work. I haven’t had a single faculty member say, “Well, I like using Interfolio… but we should have done this”;  “I wish we could use something different”; “I wish we could go back to the paper method.” Not once. And we’ve run a lot of searches.

Is there anything else that you’d like to share with us?

Faculty Search has worked very well for us. This is one of those things where you could go around campus and talk with faculty, staff, and administrators who’ve used the system, and I don’t think you would get a single negative comment—and that’s saying something.

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